How Tech and Healthcare are Looking to Partner in Meaningful Ways
Vivian Lee, president of health platforms, Verily Life Sciences
It’s always interesting to see who’s included in Modern Healthcare’s “100 Most Influential People in Healthcare” and how the list changes over time.
- In 2019, for example, Dr. Atul Gawande, CEO of Haven, the joint venture formed by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase, was included in the rankings. By 2021, Haven had been disbanded. Gawande, a surgeon, was recently appointed assistant administrator for global health at USAID.
- In 2020, Dr. David Feinberg, then vice president of Google Health, was on the influencer list. In 2021, Dr. Karen DeSalvo, recruited to Google by Feinberg in 2019, is in the list as chief health officer at Google. Feinberg is in a new role as CEO of Cerner.
Physician leaders from some of the Big Tech companies represented in the 2021 list — Verily Life Sciences (an Alphabet company), Microsoft, Google Health — share some commonalities. Rather than taking over, they want to come alongside healthcare and partner in meaningful ways. They want technology to make things easier for consumers as well as providers.
What is their vision for the future? The title of a HLTH 2021 session featuring Dr. Vivian Lee, president of health platforms at Verily Life Sciences, sums it up succinctly: “The Happy Marriage of Health and Tech.”
Dr. Lee, former CEO of University of Utah Health, took over as president of Verily Health Platforms in 2018. She says, “I think that what we’re seeing right now is that there’s just such an incredible synergy and complementarity between health and tech.
“Earlier when David [Rhew, of Microsoft] and I were talking, we were saying, ‘This is the moment. Are we going to leave the legacy of our current healthcare to the next generation? Or are we going to actually do something about it?’ And I think it’s through these kinds of partnerships where we can really aim big and really try to make a difference.”
Read the full story now and learn more: “The Happy Marriage of Health and Tech”
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